John and Iris 2, sex and lies and "violence of mind"

A while ago, I wrote about seeing the movie Iris about Iris Murdoch: mainly about her descent into Alzheimer's disease, but with extensive flashbacks to her earlier life. So on a whim yesterday, I looked up her Wikipedia article. In it, I found a link to a review of A. N. Wilson's memoir of her, published some seven years ago. (You can find it here or here.)

Of course the article is in the first instance about A. N. Wilson's book. But I think what it says about Iris in the process is fascinating -- particularly how the multiple sides of her personality all genuinely fit together. So on the one hand, this reviewer genuinely credits Iris with the luminous intelligence, the humor, the wisdom, and the lack of ego that were so widely remarked on by everybody; but then at the same time she apparently exhibited, equally certainly, a voracious promiscuity, "violence of mind", patterns of betrayal, "shameless and habitual social lying", and a "weakness for cruelty."

It is a complicated picture, and I wish I understood it better. Sometimes when I read about Iris, I am powerfully reminded of the "high-maintenance women" I have found my life orbiting around. In Wife, I can see the patterns of betrayal and the habitual lying; in D, the overpowering sexuality and -- again -- at least a real gift for falsehood. I'm not sure what "violence of mind" means, and I'm not sure if either of them has a "weakness for cruelty." I do know that Wife has confessed dark and cruel fantasies to me (just once), and she has certainly been willing to play along with the S&M fantasies of Boyfriend 5 and Friend and the gang. D has alluded to dark corners in her own soul, but I haven't had time to see them yet.

I know that years ago -- back when I still loved Wife a lot more than I do now -- I had already come to grips with the idea that the things I admired about her were connected at a deep level with these profoundly unsavory facts. If anything, I speculated that the two sides might be inseparable; that the lies and betrayal and infidelities might be somehow simply the flip side of the energy that allowed her to hit the peaks she sometimes hit. [See, e.g., "Eight things I love about Wife."] The other image I toyed with was that of beautiful flowers fertilized with shit. Either way, I had long since some to accept that it was possible for these two sides to coexist, even if I didn't understand it clearly.

This line of thought with respect to Wife, in turn, goes a long way to explain why I am not shocked by D's phenomenal sexuality. I almost think she expected me to be a little shocked, at first, because it is so overwhelming; and I think she is still a little taken aback when I remind her as a matter of course that this is simply who she is at the deepest level ... and so she might as well embrace it as a Calling of some kind, because it's not like she'll ever be able to set it down and walk away. But of course I had long before accepted that the inner truth of even the most admirable person won't come close to resembling the Disney cartoon that we all try to show in public. So it has never been any big deal.

I still don't understand it very well.